by Naomi West
I stand and wipe away my remaining tears, we need to get out of this hall and away from the open window as fast as we can. Motioning for them all to follow me, I pad lightly down the hallway.
Most of the bedroom doors are closed, but Artuz and I clear the ones that are open, confirming there isn’t anyone waiting to ambush us. Fabi was right. This wing of Greco’s mansion is completely devoid of people. It takes us ten tense minutes to make our way to the bowels of the building, where Greco is holed up. The only sound is Dante’s labored breath, although the longer we go, the quieter he becomes. He must not have gotten a straight shot to the face and for that I’m grateful.
The long hallway ends and I realize there’s a balcony at the end. This must lead to the large staircase that Fabi mentioned. At the bottom of that staircase is the door to Greco’s rooms. That’s where he’ll be. I crouch to creep toward the end of the hallway, shrinking from the light that is seeping in from the balcony area.
The other three stay back as I quickly scope out what we’re dealing with and crawl back.
“Four guards positioned around the lip of the balcony, two on the stairs and two on the door of Greco’s rooms,” I whisper. Artuz and Dante nod, looking determined, Fabi gulps and tightens his hands around the gun he holds in front of him. For a second he looks so young.
“Alessia,” he whispers to himself and a look of sheer ferocity crosses his face. It’s a good reminder for all of us.
I push thoughts of her out of my mind. I can’t think about her right now. I can’t get distracted. The four of us make eye contact, stand, and stalk to the entrance of the balcony. Our goal is to move fast and to keep going no matter what. We have to reach the guards at the bottom of the stairs in thirty seconds or less or else Greco is going to lock himself in the safe room he keeps in his chambers.
We don’t pause, we don’t move in unison, we just fucking go. Artuz steps into the light and takes out two of the guards in less than two seconds. I take out one and Dante the other. Even with no contacts and an eye full of tear gas, he’s still got good aim.
Fabi is flying around the curve of the balcony and in a ridiculously smooth move he’s sliding down the banister, boots first and lands a direct kick to the chest of one of the guards. He pistol whips the other across the chin and the man crumples like a tissue against the floor. Before we can stop him, Fabi is ripping open the door to Greco’s chambers.
Gunshots echo and bullets fly out the door, directly into Fabi and he crumbles to the ground next to the guards. Dante screams and jumps ten stairs at a time. I can only hope the bullets caught Fabi in his vest. Artuz grabs Dante by the shoulder and pulls him up short before he jumps into the line of fire in an effort to get to his brother.
I’m there a second later. Bullets are still flying out the open door, shooting at anything and everything. A thought hits me. Greco is desperate. This isn’t the gunfire of a man who knows how to pick off opponents. Crawling forward, I reach my hand out just far enough to grab Fabi’s boot. A bullet pierces the ground inches away from my fingertips but I lunge forward and grab Fabi’s leg, yanking his dead weight back into the safe zone.
He groans and blink his eyes as Dante shakes him by the shoulders. A dot of red is spreading on his shoulder but he speaks. “I’m okay, I’m okay. Just my shoulder. Thanks for pulling me back, Dare.”
Dante leans back on his heels and lets out a breath. He quickly cuffs me on the back of the neck. “I always wanted Alessia to end up with an accountant or a pharmacist or something,” he says, “but I guess you’ll do.”
We grin at each other for just a second before the gunfire starts up in the room again. This time the bullets puncture the door and the wall. They’re systematically coming for us.
Enough of this. I pull the pin on a smoke bomb and toss it into the room.
“Scatter!” a man yells. They think it’s a grenade, but it’ll obscure their vision just long enough for us to get into the room.
Dante and Artuz follow me in, the three of us spreading out along the walls. We hear scrambling and a few yells, and then a quiet reedy voice trying to command the chaos. Greco. I’d know that voice anywhere.
The smoke begins to clear and instantly Artuz takes out three of the guards in quick succession. Dante shoots down two more and I take out the last one, who has thrown his body across Greco. Greco shoves the dead man off of him in disgust. The look on his face puts ice on my face. He’s skinny and hollow and has deep, dark smudges under his eyes and his mouth is like a little prune. He’s always given me the creeps and that was just when he was talking, doing deals with Patrizzio. Now that he’s heartlessly kicking away the body of a man who has just died for him, I feel a complete and utter revulsion rise inside of me.
“Kill me,” Greco sneers holding his arms out to Dante. “Go ahead and kill me for your father,” Dante raises his gun and Greco laughs, “but just so you know, you’re too late to save your sister.”
Dante falters, his gun lowering just a little bit. My blood turns slow in my veins. I feel like I’m trying to hear through a brick wall.
“I dispatched an assassin to take care of her hours ago,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” Dante says, his voice is strong and I’m glad for it, I don’t even know if I could speak right now.
“Believe it or not, one of my most successful hitmen sent me confirmation an hour ago. He’s on his way back from a little village in Northern Scotland right now.”
Dante quickly glances at me to see my reaction but I’m not looking at him. Horror has clenched my gut. My blood is ice in my veins. There’s a roaring in my ears as I lift my arm. He’s not looking at me. I want him to see the man who is going to take his life for what he did.
“Greco,” I say and he turns. His hand goes inside his jacket for a gun, I’m sure, but I barely give him the chance.
Alessia’s gorgeous face flashes before my eyes. The way she looks when she’s looking right through me. Her cute know-it-all look when she’s answering a question in class. Her face while she’s sleeping. Scowling. Laughing. Alessia. The most gorgeous creature on this earth. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
I shoot six bullets into Greco’s heart.
He wheezes, making a delicate little noise as he stares me in the eye. He has a strange, curious look on his face as a trickle of blood seeps out of the side of his mouth. Miraculously, he stays standing as Dante unloads another six shells in his back.
The disgusting man sways, dead on his feet. He hits knees first and falls face down with a sickening smack. Pools of blood are leaking out of all the men on the floor. I look around at the carnage. Don’t let this all be for nothing. Don’t let my life be for nothing.
Let her be alive. Let her be alive.
“Call her!” I hear a familiar voice yelling from behind me. “Call her! Call her, Dare.”
Fabi is screaming from the hallway and Dante is rushing toward me, searching my pockets for my phone.
I bat his hand away and stride out of the hallway. I feel Artuz’s hand on my shoulder as I open my phone to get her number. I almost jerk away from him, but then I’m realizing what he’s telling me. Don’t break protocol. We had a plan and we have to stick to it. We need to get the fuck out of this mansion and back to our van. In an hour, Dante is going to send in the patented Patrizzio clean-up crew to dispose of the bodies and any evidence we may have left behind.
Dante grabs Fabi under his good shoulder and drags him to his feet. The four of us quickly make our way up the spiral staircase and back down the hallway we came in through. Somehow, I’m out the window and Artuz is dragging me along, but it’s all a blur to me. I feel like I’m walking through a fog so thick I can barely see my hands in front of me.
“The alarms,” Artuz says in my ear. “Work your magic on the alarms, Guinne. We can’t have the cops showing up before the clean-up crew does.”
His words register through my haze and I pull out my phone. I barely pay attention to
what I’m doing as I click through the security features turning them off and on so that we can pass by undetected. Once we’re through the grounds, we break into a sprint, the four of us racing through the trees. Finally, in the distance, I can see our van, parked so benignly in the shadows.
I yank the door open, and as soon as we’re all in and Artuz is pulling away from the curb, I pull out my phone again. I select the number of the burner phone I gave Alessia before I left. I hold the phone to my ear and listen to it ring.
“Pick up. Pick up. Pick UP,” I mutter to myself, dragging a hand over my face. Her brothers sit in the back of the van with me, staring at the phone in my hand, willing Alessia to answer on the other end. Fabi grips his bloody shoulder and Dante nearly rips the hair from his scalp as he watches me. I look away from them. They look too much like her.
My shoulders sag as I clutch the phone to my face. The phone keeps ringing.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Alessia
I can’t sleep when Dare is off killing people. Yet another reason why he will never be allowed to go off killing people again no matter how dire the reason is. I huff and turn over in my bed.
I spent the entire day alternating between walking on the moon because I finally knew that Rett was alive and well and sinking through the floor in anxious misery picturing the battle zone that Dare was about to walk into. The thought of Greco in the same room as Dare was enough to give me butterflies and a splitting head ache. I could tell that I was making Dare’s parents nervous with all my pacing and fingernail biting, but they wouldn’t let me go stay at his cottage.
“No, miss,” Alistair had said. “Ye’ll stay right here, where I can see yeh.”
I’d stayed in their kitchen, cooking more pies than we could eat in a year and enough stew for an army. That’s when Dare’s mom had shooed me out of the kitchen.
“If you’re gonna worry yourself to death, you might as well make something that’s not going to expire,” Annabelle had said to me. That’s when she’d taught me to crochet.
I’d already made two feet of a blanket as a way to ease my nervousness. A bird chirps, I rush to my phone. The oven timer dings, I rush to my phone. Dare’s dad sneezes in the other room, I rush to my phone.
Ridiculous. I was acting ridiculous and I knew it. But I couldn’t stop. Finally, after it was reasonably dark outside I locked myself in the guest bedroom and ran a bath. I stayed in until the water got cold and then got into bed and listened to the ocean which is where I’ve been ever since. For about five hours. Soon, the sun will come up and I’ll have to face another day of worrying my brains out.
I take a deep breath. At this rate, Dare will come home and I’ll have gained thirty pounds and half a head of gray hairs from all this stressing. He said he’d love me no matter what, so he’s just going to have to deal with it.
I punch my pillow and roll over, trying to get comfortable for the last hour or so before dawn but as my head comes up off the pillow as I hear a small creaking sound from down below. This house is a hundred years old and it makes all sorts of noises. This one sounded kind of like a scraping sound. I shrug and pull the blankets over my shoulder even further.
I’m even more on alert now and I know there is no way I’m going to get any rest. All I can think of is Dare sleeping next to me. Holding me. He has such a solid, reassuring heat. I feel a warmth rise up in me just from thinking about him. The thought of his voice, his hands, his presence, all of it, it just warms me.
You know why that is? a little voice hisses from inside me. It’s because you love him, you idiot.
I should have told him. I’m not so proud that I can't admit when I'm wrong and I’m definitely wrong to have let it go unsaid. He should have known how I felt about him before he went off to take care of everything for me. To kill for me. I have to at least acknowledge the truth of it to myself.
I love him. So much I can barely breathe, and he's out there making the world safe for me to live in. I find my hand reaching out to the phone he gave me. I want to call him and tell him. I drop my hand.
I’m halfway through a sigh when I freeze. There it is again. The scraping noise. Only this time it sounds like it it’s coming from the stairs. I hold still long enough to hear it again, right outside my door. I look down at the crack of light between the floor and the door and see two feet standing there.
Something creeps up the back of my spine but it’s not worry or fear. It’s adrenaline. It isn’t either of Dare’s parents, I would have heard them coming from the other direction, from their bedroom. Could it be a neighbor? Doubtful.
I’m the daughter of highly powerful, but currently incapacitated, mobster. What’s infinitely more likely is that someone is here to murder me. Scenarios flash through my brain. A hired gun, here to end it. Most likely with a silencer. He’ll be gone before my blood cools.
I hear another creak and I wait for the doorknob to turn. I don’t have a weapon, there’s nothing in this room, but I gently reach out and grip the bottom of the brass lamp on the bedside table. My hand curls around the bottom of it lovingly, like it’s the hand of a friend.
Fucking Patrizzio genes. Making me a gangster even when I don’t want to be.
The door slides open, and if it’s creaky or silent, I have no idea. There’s a dull roaring in my ears as adrenaline takes over my body. I feel like a new person, not quite Alessia. I’m a warrior. The person takes two quick steps into my room and stands over me. They lift a hand holding something dark.
I don’t hesitate. Using all my adrenaline and all my body weight, I swing the lamp through the air and smash it into the face of the man. The sheer force of it stuns me. It feels like a car crash in my hands. I didn’t account for the fact that the lamp was still plugged in. The lightbulb smashes in his eye and the bare socket makes contact with his skin. He yelps and screams as white hot sparks lace out over his face. The shock forces me to drop the lamp from my hand and the man stumbles. First, he crashes into my nightstand and I hear something crunch under his foot. Then he trips backwards, his back crashing into the wall on the far side of the room.
The door to my bedroom flings open again. Alistair is standing there, bare chested and baggy long johns flapping around him. He’s holding a shotgun up. Annabelle is crouching behind him, a meat cleaver in her hand. The looks on their faces are ones of complete ferocity. Protectiveness.
“Hands up, boy,” Alistair growls.
The man, completely dazed by the electric shock shakes his head and puts his hands up as he slides down the wall. It’s then that I realize that he’s dropped his gun. There’s a silencer screwed to the barrel.
I leap down off the bed and pick it up. I discreetly switch the safety back on and saunter over to him. As I get closer, the moonlight lances in through the window and illuminates his face. When I’d been picturing him on the other side of the door, I had been imagining a grizzled old assassin, but this kid can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen years old. His face is cut and burned on one side from my attack with the lamp, and the other half of his face barely has a full set of stubble.
Part of my heart opens to this kid, obviously caught up in something bigger than him. But the other part of me, the Patrizzio part of me, remembers him standing over me just now, pointing a gun at my heart. I raise the gun over my shoulder and backhand the shit out of him.
His head flies to one side and he spits blood.
Behind me, Annabelle gasps. I inwardly sigh.
“Pretty sure I can guess, but tell me who sent you,” I order, studying his blood on the butt of the gun.
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Look, kid. Tell me who sent you and maybe I’ll play nice. Don’t tell me and I’ll lock you in a room with this guy,” I point at Alistair. His hair is standing up straight, his eyes are wild and bloodshot, and there’s about a foot-long scar across his chest that I’ve never seen before.
The guy on the floor lifts his hands even higher up the wall. “Grec
o,” he says immediately.
“Show me you don’t have any more weapons on you,” I say.
“How?”
I think for a second. “Alistair, I’m gonna pat him down. Keep your gun on him. If he does anything remotely aggressive, shoot this asshole.”
Alistair nods curtly. I ignore Annabelle’s wide eyes.
I toss the gun on the bed behind me and move slowly toward the kid. He stands and holds his arms out to the sides. I quickly pat him down, uncovering a knife in his boot and another small handgun in the pocket of his coat. I disable and toss those weapons onto the bed.
I survey the kid as the first licks of the sunrise come up over the ocean. “What’s your name?” I ask him, cocking my head to one side and crossing my legs.
He drops his eyes, looking down. “Kennedy.”
I cross my arms. “Is that a first name or a last name?”